4/10/2008 @ 6:00PM

America's Most Congested Cities

Despite support, most notably from Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City’s congestion pricing plan stalled his week when the state Senate refused to assemble a vote on it. Had it gone forward, and passed, the plan would have charged drivers $8 to enter Manhattan below 60th Street during peak traffic hours.

Failed public policy initiatives like this are just one element contributing to gridlock nationwide. In other cities, overbuilding has lengthened commute times and delays. In Washington, D.C., for example, the country’s most congested city by our measures, sprawl has compounded already existing traffic problems.

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To determine the rest, we took the 75 largest metro areas and calculated which logged the longest commuting times and the longest delays.

The Texas Transportation Institute (TTI), a research division of Texas A&M University which measures congestion by how long the average traveler is delayed on his route to and from work during peak commuting hours, provided data on delays.

But congestion is more than hitting red lights and merging onto highways with nicknames like the MacArthur Maze in the Bay Area, or the Mixing Bowl in the D.C. metro, where traffic routinely comes to a screeching halt and the only thing accelerating is driver stress levels.

For this reason, we combined data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2006 American Community Survey–it measures commuter travel time by car, bus and subway–to see what percent of each metro’s commuters spend 45 minutes or more getting to work.

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By these measures, we found that those in Chicago spend far less time stuck in traffic than commuters in Los Angeles (46 hours a year compared with 72), but that 25% of Chicago workers spend 45 minutes or more commuting, as compared with 19% for those in Los Angeles.

This is true of many Western and Sunbelt cities when examined next to their East Coast and Midwest counterparts. While Houstonians spend 56 hours a year in traffic, according to the TTI, only 20% spend more than 45 minutes getting to work.New Yorkers get stuck 46 hours a year in traffic, but 43% spend 45 minutes or more commuting.

The reason is simple, says Alan Pisarski, a consultant to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Older cities like New York, or Chicago, which had million-plus populations in the 19th century, feature dense areas where industry and commerce are clustered, creating lengthy commutes for people living in the outlying suburbs. In the suburbs of cities that boomed in the automotive age, like Los Angeles, Houston and Atlanta, office parks dot the landscape.

Here, it’s fairly common for people to commute from one suburb to another, from say Pasadena, Calif., to office buildings in Glendale, a 15-minute drive on what can be a slow-moving freeway. Not so on Long Island, N.Y. The majority of people living in Port Washington, on Long Island’s North Shore, commute to Manhattan, a 35 to 45 minute train ride away.

Systems like the Long Island Railroad are possible options for many of the country’s congested cities. But installing them can be costly. Dallas is spending $900 million through 2018 for extensions of its DART rail system into North Texas.

This is a good strategy, says Robert Puentes, a researcher at the Brookings Institution, in Washington, D.C. He suggests that new commercial centers will develop along the train’s line. Shorter commutes will follow.

Others say that such solutions are most viable in cities with densely packed population and business centers. Without them, trains cannot connect people to their jobs.

“Transit works really well when you have a lot of people going from somewhere to somewhere and where you can get a lot of people walking to transit,” says Tim Lomax, a researcher at the Texas Transportation Institute. “But you have to recognize where transit works well and where it doesn’t. The decision about how much and where to add capacity should come from where the jobs are, how many there are and how dense they are.”